It’s Alive!
East Asian medicine is an animist medicine. It is born of a worldview where everything, every mountain, raindrop, and twisty tie, is alive. I have to be honest, nothing excites me more than this. This way of knowing sparks something in me that is pulsing, raging, wide-open. It is radical to know and live this way, and I thirst for more of it.
Some ways of modern medicine look at the body and see a mechanical structure built of many inanimate parts. This begs the question: Where does life come from and how is it possible that we, built of inanimate meat, are alive? In college I took a course called Philosophy of Life. One of the texts we read proposed that life is an emergent property, something that arises from certain conditions but is not itself contained within those conditions. I remember having the same question then- How could something so complex and rich as aliveness emerge out of nothing?
In this medicine, life belongs to everything. We are alive because our organs are alive, our organs are alive because the five elements are alive, the elements are alive because Yin, Yang, and Qi are alive. The Universe is alive, all of it. This animism shows up in beautiful ways in the scientific narrative of East Asian Medicine. We often think of the Heart as having its own innate intelligence, but the Lung, Liver, Kidneys, and Spleen each have their own spirit too. The same goes for the five elements, which are in no way inert but also have their own character, personality, and way of being. We exist in a stew of livingness, and a stew of livingness exists within us.
What I love most about this is that, if everything is alive, then our movement through the world is a dance of infinite partners. I think the ethical implications of this are vast. If there is nothing lifeless and inert, then our field of respect must widen. If everything is its own entity, then nothing gives itself to be manipulated for our own ends. This applies to us as well: our bodies are intricate living systems made up of countless other intricate living systems, and our medicine should approach with the reverence and curiosity required to meet such a phenomenon.